In the absence of the rule of law, it is to this youth that the lawyer, doctor, professor turns. These youth, sometimes for the first time in their lives, enjoy respect. When the violence ends and the rule of law is restored, they revert to their previous positions as cobblers, butchers, touts and “watu wa mkono” and look back with nostalgia to the violent period when they were respected.

Each protracted violent conflict in Africa has a set of similar dynamics that includes a resource and foreign interference such as supply of arms. May women, indeed silence the guns.

Can today’s African Union carry the aspirations of pan-Africanists and define African challenges and solutions through the lens of what Martin Luther King referred to as “the fierce urgency of now”?